


Secret Fire

by Smaragdina



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-03
Updated: 2012-12-03
Packaged: 2017-11-20 03:35:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/580877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smaragdina/pseuds/Smaragdina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He will kneel, Galadriel can see, exactly seven times in his life. Once to a woman with hair that is carved from light. Thrice in the face of death – a father, a son, himself. Thrice, and exactly thrice, to her." Fëanor knows fire and Nerdanel knows fire, albeit in different ways. Galadriel knows the hearts of men, and denies his request three times.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Secret Fire

**Author's Note:**

> For the sake of clarity, I've used characters' familiar Sindarin names instead of their more accurate Quenya ones.

The smell of flame comes on the wind before him, like a memory of forest fires across the eastern sea so long ago. He banks the heat of his forge too high. The wonders that he smiths are plucked, blazing, out of fires that are doubtless hungry for his flesh. It is a dangerous thing.

Galadriel understands the appeal.

She is standing in the center of the light between the Trees the first time he comes to her alone, and the scent of fire fans before him and announces his arrival like a banner. Her raiment is pale. The beams from Telperion silver the outline of her limbs, and the beams from Laurelin gild her like a treasure, and the beams from both of them linger and tangle in her hair, and the light of her hair flows around her and defines and announces her as surely as the sharp smell of forging fire.

Fëanor’s hands are black from the forge, and his eyes shine like coals in the half-light dark. When he slides to one knee before her, the motion is stiff. His body falls into the position only by force. He is not a man who is used to kneeling.

(He will kneel, Galadriel can see, exactly seven times in his life. Once to a woman with hair that is carved from light. Thrice in the face of death – a father, a son, himself. Thrice, and exactly thrice, to her).

“One hair,” Fëanor begs. His hands are open, spread. “I ask for one hair from the crown of your head. I will set it under glass and study it with lenses made from the clearest crystal. I will gild it with gold and silver. I will take its beauty and set it among our beloved stars.”

Galadriel looks down at him, she can see through the smoke that swirls around him and pierce straight to his heart. She can see that he is heralded not by the memory of the forge (flame purposeful and checked) but instead by the memory of wildfires: howling under a star-laced sky in the tree-dark lands across the sea, consuming, devouring, deadly and so _glorious_.

He will light these fires anew.

“No,” she says. “No.”

*****

Fire, Nerdanel understands, is a thing that can be shaped.

She is not a beauty in a way that minstrels like to immortalize in song – but even as a small girl, she makes beauty with her hands. First, watching, at her father’s side. He teaches her the language of the forge, all the secret whisperings of coal and wind and quenching water. They stand side-by-side and work metal into wondrous shapes. The coals light their faces, shadow the hollows of their cheeks, further redden their unbeautiful red-shaded skin, wake all the color in their shared red hair.

Fire, Nerdanel learns, is a thing that can destroy and build, and the balance must be carefully kept. It is a thing that must be cared for. Banked and watched and beloved.

When she is older, she leaves the smithy behind. Purges herself of the scent of smoke. She turns to stone instead. Instead of tempering and caging fire into steel, she does the opposite: she takes solid granite or shining marble and gently, lovingly, wakes all the heat within it, gives it a life that burns eternal.

Her sculptures are beautiful. Her sculptures are nearly alive. She carves statues of everything she remembers and everything she sees: the memory of the rough mountains and dark forests of the land across the sea, the clear lines and blazing beauty of the high mountains and colored forests of the land around her. She carves the white caps of the eastern see in marble pale as snow, set with glittering glass. She carves the fair forms of her people in marble shot with veins as dark as blood.

She carves.

She re-makes the world around her in a shape that is more alive than life – in a shape that glows with its own inner fire that will never consume itself, and never crumble, and never fade.

*****

Fëanor creates mail of molten silver, and shields that shine like mirrors, and swords with edges so thin and fine that they seem to be made of glass. They sit in the bowels of his armory. They do not rust. They wait. They are unused and unworn.

There is nothing to fight in Valinor.

The armories of Galadriel’s father are nearly as fine. She dresses herself in mail as delicate as the scales of a fish, all in shining white. Her hunting bow is as smoothly curved as the neck of a swan. Her cloak is all in shades of red. She rides to the woods of Oromë and she joins the Vala for a day, and the music of horn and baying hound is the sweetest she has ever heard.

If she closes her eyes and breathes in the scent of pine and earth and hart’s-blood around her, she can imagine that the trees that twist their branches high above them are the trees of Middle-Earth across the sea. That the borders of the forest have no bounds. That she can carve out a kingdom here, can take a sword in hand and blaze a glory of her own.

The light of Telperion glitters on the air when she reaches the edge of the forest. Galadriel has bound her hair back in a braid and braided it with strands of silver set with jewels. And the light of the Tree catches in her hair and stays there, and redoubles and enriches itself, and the jewels may as well be river stones against that brilliance, and the shining silver may as well be dross.

Fëanor stands on the edge of the wood where the shadows are thickest, and in the face of the silver all around her he falls stiffly to one knee.

“One hair,” he begs. “I will make it such a beauty that all the minstrels will set it into song, and the songs will be nothing in comparison. All the works of my hands pale next to you. One hair, and I will use your beauty to forge the greatest work of all.”

Galadriel slides from the back of her horse. The leaf-loam crunches softly under her feet, releases faint bursts of rich scent. It is nearly like the scent of Middle-Earth so long ago. “What do you see,” she asks, “when you look at me?”

“I see the light of the Trees made flesh.”

“And you would capture and possess it?”

“I would glorify it.”

“How selfish,” says Galadriel calmly, “to think that I exist only as raw steel to be shaped and made strong by you.”

*****

Nerdanel’s hair is as red as living flame. When she works, sweat darkens it and makes it cling to her face, and it is as fire lancing over her skin. She is not beautiful; she is _ablaze_.

Her hair is fire, and the scent of her father’s forge is all fire, and she holds a chisel in her raw-chapped hands and nearly, _nearly_ gives the Secret Fire to every stone she touches. It is not a forging. It is not a shaping; it is an uncovering. It is a birth.

She stands on the shores of the eastern sea and turns her back to it; that is not the way that her desires lie. The waves are a roar in her ears as she carves. She tilts her body toward the wide lands of Valinor spread before her and the men who live there and know fire as well as she, and the block of pale marble takes shape under her  hands. Slowly, it gains life. Slowly, it begins to breathe.

A man, kneeling, hands spread wide, forge-fire dancing in the depths of his eyes.

A woman, armored, standing tall and unforgiving and _ungiving_ as any lord.

Her hair, flowing in the wind like water, the light of the Trees brought down to walk amongst them all.

Nerdanel has heard of Fëanor’s double request. It is a foolish thing. He is a foolish man. He intends to take a living hair from the Lady Galadriel and set it under shining glass and set it amidst star and song. He does not understand that fire cannot be set under glass; it is a thing that _lives_. To pluck it from that life would snuff it out.

Fëanor would adore the light of Galadriel’s hair but not love it. Fire is a thing that must be loved.

She cannot get the sculpture right. It is not Galadriel that confounds her (though the woman’s carven hair is a pale poor copy of its living silver-gold; this is a fault of the marble and not of Nerdanel’s skill). It is Fëanor. It is the way that the marble is so pure. Fëanor is a man shot through with the impurities of the forge, and none of his flesh is ever clean – he is always dirtied with ink, with smoke, with dust of metal or with desire.

It is his position on his knees, which does not seem natural or true at all.

It is the way that Fëanor in life is carved from living fire, and no still sculpture of Nerdanel’s can ever hope to hold him.

Seven times, she starts anew. Seven times, she smashes the sculpture and fills the air with white dust. The white gulls scream above her. The white caps of the waves crash on with a relentless rolling forward. Seven times Nerdanel creates the man and seven times she breaks him, because this is the first work of her hands whose form she cannot hope to understand.

*****

The woods of Oromë are dark with the memory of Middle-Earth; the fields of Yavanna hold no memories at all, only fertile promise, and her woods are open and green. Galadriel walks among them and follows in the Vala’s wake, learning the way that life springs up under the press of her feet. She learns the song of springtime that Yavanna sings to the trees. She joins her for a day, and then she leaves her and walks alone.

She sings of leaves, of leaves of gold, and leaves of gold there grow – wide and long and shaped like the heads of arrows, branching from the fresh trunks of trees that stand as straight as a forest of silver spears. The trees here in Valinor are more solid and _real_ than anything that could ever be in Middle-Earth. When Galadriel reaches above her head and takes one of the golden leaves in hand, its edges cut her white skin.

Her raiment is green as spring, and the blood on her hand beads red as rubies and battles and desire. Her hair is free and shining in the wind that whispers in the golden leaves, and it holds the light of Laurelin within; and the light of that Tree shines down through the leaves above and fires in her hair so that she burns as bright as any star.

Fëanor is there. He stands in shadow. The light of Laurelin is at his back and does not touch his face. His eyes shine like living coals, and when he drops ungraceful to one knee it does not lessen their darkness at all.

“One hair,” he begs, as ever before. “You are beautiful. Let me have a single strand of that beauty. You are crowned with the glory of Ilúvatar Himself, greater than the beauty of any Elf or Maia or Vala. The beauty of your hair is greater than the beauty of the Trees, because it is a part of you. Let me have but one hair, and I will work such wonders with it. Please.”

“Stand,” says Galadriel.

He does.

He is draped and cloaked all in smoke, in the dangerous smell of an unchecked fire. He will burn the woods around them to ashes if not banked and watched and beloved.

“You can see into men’s hearts,” says Fëanor. His head is high. He has the skill to shape worlds as artfully as he shapes steel, but the shape that serves him now is simple and his words are direct. “What do you see,” he asks, “when you look at me? Can you not see that I am honest? Can you not see that my desire is pure?”

“Your desire is pure,” Galdriel replies, words simple and direct to match. “But your heart is not. Leave me, Fëanor. Seek out a woman who you will love for the things she creates, and not what you create from her.”

*****

The light from the two Trees is mingling in the sky as Nerdanel walks home. At each step, marble dust falls from her frame like snow. It is not as glittering as the dust of jewel that coats the streets of Tirion; but it is just as fine, and just as precious, and just as white, and it contains a potential for life that all those jewels put together cannot match.

In the shade of the two Trees there is a man, standing. His head is tilted back. He studies the shifting light above as if it holds all the secrets he desires. And as Nerdanel passes, the wind blows about her and lifts a veil of dust from her shoulders and blows it down before her, so that the white fine rain of marble announces her as sure as any banner.

Marble has a scent, though the scent is too fine for those who do not know it to tell. It is nothing like the scent of smoke or too-hot forging flame. But it contains the same potential. It is steadier, cooler, brighter. It is pure.

Fëanor turns.

Nerdanel’s hair is bound back tight in a braid as stiff as a thing carved. And its color is nothing like the light of the two Trees. It holds nothing of silver and nothing of gold; and the silver and gold light clashes against it, and blazes upon it, and wakes color as bright as the memory and herald of wildfire across the sea. She watches Fëanor’s eyes pass over this color and linger there, because it is a thing he knows, because fire is a thing they both know so well.

“I have tried to carve you,” she says (because she has little skill at shaping words, and this is a greeting enough for both of them). “Seven times. I cannot get it right.”

Fëanor gives her the shadow of a smile. “I am usually the one who makes beauty,” he tells her. “I am not used to inspiring it.”

Nerdanel is not Galadriel. Her light is not the same. Her desires are pointed away from the sea and not across it. She does not have the woman’s beauty or glory or ambition. She does not have her power to see inside hearts. But she needs no such power, now, to see a day when Fëanor will kneel in pose and she will attempt to sculpt him from life and not from memory; that the pose will still not sit well with him; that the sculpture will still be a shadow of his fire. That the sculpture will sit unfinished, because as he kneels he will eventually begin to request things more warm and lasting than any stone.

That he is the only man she will never be able to carve from stone, because stone cannot hold a life such as his.

That she is the only woman whose hair he will twine around his fingers and love it not for its color, not for its fire, but because it is a thing he does not need to posses.

But this will come in other days.

For now, Nerdanel turns. She walks away. She is draped in the eternal scent of stone and he is clouded over with the dangerous scent of smoke, and these swirl and curl together in the evening air, now; and Galadriel stands on a hill above them and smiles to herself.

(She can see that Nerdanel creates and Fëanor creates, and together they will create exactly seven things anew. And it will not be imitation, it will not be a pale copy of a living man or a thing to be set under glass and adored; it will be flame and life given flesh instead of flame worked into steel or stone, hearth and wildfire blazing together. It will be the best works of their hands above all).


End file.
